Ask A Historian

[Wyrd of Gawd]

I very much enjoyed Toland's The Rising Sun, as well as Infamy which, while I did not agree with his conclusion about foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor, shocked me into how much about the leadup to Pearl Harbor I did not know, where the Brits, Dutch, and Americans did practically everything in their power to get Japan to hit us somewhere as a way to incentivize the isolationist American people to enter WW2. The more likely explanation, to me, has always been racism: we didn't think the Japanese were intelligent enough to hit us as hard and as thoroughly as they did, and as a result made a lot of stupid errors that compounded the damage. I also wanted to read his book about Hitler, but unfortunately it was in high demand among the Nazi sympathizers that are rampant in the Missouri prison system, and I never got a chance to pick it up.

The US government knew in the 1920s that we would have a major war with Japan.  In the 1930s the US was too poor to fully arm up for the coming fight but it did fund the B29 long range bomber to be the primary weapon system to attack the Japanese islands.  

Believe it or not that history is in the New York Times archives.  The paper needs money so it charges for some articles.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.ht...838A629EDE

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.ht...838C639EDE  
The thinking was that the US would be fighting a Japanese/British team instead of a Japanese/German/Italian team.

BTW, we had some great propaganda posters against the Germans and Japanese during WWII.  They got the troops in the mood to burn people alive.
https://www.google.com/search?q=wwii+pro...14&bih=898